The waltz of her laugh through the murkiness brought a second wave of pleasure. She bridled the words on her lips. When she said them at last, her voice was an octave lower than I had imagined.
"Clever to find me here. But do you think we should know each other's names? If we meet again, 'you' might be inadequate."
"I can't believe this."
"I almost can't, unless you've come for your book. . . . Do you read Bunin? Lucky people begin believing they embody special virtue."
I felt we were making the sweet small talk of beautiful people tipsy on champagne. Again I thought of The Master and Margarita. "Do you read Bulgakov?" I countered, but again waited before explaining.
We talked about chance and traveling. She took my foreign-ness as casually as my proffered glass of beer, asking neither why I was in Russia nor what I was doing in a back-country railroad station. It might have been our old custom to take a weekend drink there—in the dead of night when, except for the station, the city was long asleep.
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"Are you tired?" I found it natural to ask.
"Not like last night. . . . Why are so many men sailing the world solo?" she said, gazing at the train departures. "Do you think people are trying to protect their fantasies against a universal commonwealth?"
"Are you a loner?" I asked in reply.
"Anything but. My panda attends me."
"But you protect your inner thoughts."
She examined my eyes again. "Less than you, serious one. Much less than you."
We shared more beer, then brandy for antifreeze. She led me through the gelid night to her uncle's room, half of a log cabin even more rustic than those I'd previously seen because it stood alone, in a village-like outskirt. Gulping the sweet wine for which Anastasia had hiked to the station, the old-timer stared into his oil lamp, cackling a monologue about a pilot incinerated in a Liberator that had crashed ferrying supplies to his unit during the war.
I wouldn't have believed that anything I'd see during the trip would be more remote from my world than Volga moonlight and the station's shadowy eeriness, but the hut and its dilapidation were farther into fairyland. Accusing me of not helping him with his chores last week, the scrawny uncle embraced me in forgiveness, repeating an old Russian aphorism about everyone being a sinner.
Anastasia guided me up a homemade ladder and into an attic containing a dresser and a bed. It was not a "night of love" because only hours remained before I had to answer our "guide's" roll call at the hotel; and also because I was too full of bewildered admiration—for the smoothness of her skin, suppleness of her limbs, provocative matter-of-factness. Too edgy at the strange surroundings, risk of detection, challenge of performance. She smelled of Seville oranges. Although her uncle slept days and brooded at night, she assured me he was deaf Even during our first embrace with her long legs, I noticed that she accepted our adventure as it came, concentrating on its physical sensations, while my thoughts rebounded in compartments for analyzing unusual phenomena and appraising my reactions. What did it mean that I was with her in this incredible situation?
Anastasia X 24 7
In the darkness before dawn, she walked me to the hotel and my day of group touring of monuments and a tire factory. At the weatherworn peasant market, we persuaded a woman to sell us her steaming pirozhki before opening hours, and I was introduced to her celebration of food. If it were in me, I'd have loved her as much as the knight—as she could already make me feel about myself for moments—who had stumbled on his Russian princess. But it was just these symbols, which the dramatic night and I had cast up, that prevented me from being real.
Despite associations with Romanov heraldry and the Winter Palace, hers is a peasant name; she is a country girl. Therefore, I wonder where her sprucelike individualism germinated. Her attitude toward religion, for example, typically centers about herself, rather than Church or State. Contemptuous of the Orthodox church in general and of its obscurantist subjugation of believers—the spectacle of ragged women's foreheads on a crumbling vestry floor makes her wince—she is nevertheless drawn to murky cathedrals: to the mystique of candles flickering on icons and choirs chanting their captivating dissonance; and she pulls me in with her, especially to a dark one near her dormitory, at every chance. Shuddering at the Gunga Din prostration, she simultaneously exults that primordial Russian forces have a hold on an unfathomable part of her.
The same ambiguity surrounds her own origins. She is appalled—and excited—by the mud and vodka of village life and often guides me on a walk from the last metro stop to absorb the countryside's psychic stimulation and strange grant of peace. We tramp for hours along meandering trails and eroded stream beds, saddened and gladdened at the rural backwardness and resistance to change. Even polluted ponds and dumps of old pipes heighten the haunting desolation.
About Russia itself, Anastasia's feelings shift sharply. Most days, she knows it as a coarse, dreary place best suited to proving Dostoyevsky's maxim about misery being as important as happiness to the human race. She scorns the superstitious, passive masses who acclaim their oppressors almost as acidly as the leadership's frauds. She can't remember Lenin's birthplace on the Volga or the cruiser Aurora of the first revolutionary
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shot—which are repeated a dozen times daily (in case someone missed the hundreds of school lectures) on every radio station.
Ordinarily she will not glance at a newspaper or popular magazine. Bored waiting for a train at a suburban station, she once picked up Pravda and tried to read, but the onward-to-Communism tone switched her off as emphatically as when she witnessed Samoilov's mutilation of Hamlet. Plowing through the leads of several articles, she pushed the paper back at me and closed her eyes to nap, her frown indicating she'd not repeat that mistake for another year.
Her reaction to such things derives not from any interest in politics, but from her intuition that the Soviet setup is "a big bother" because it prevents her from tasting the world's treats: the cup of espresso, a visit to Rome. "Bananas and cream?" I once answered her query about the phrase encountered in her reading. "That's an expression we know from childhood. Like corned beef and cabbage, or ham and eggs."
"Of course," she replied with sudden annoyance. "In Russia we too have an expression. Bread and lard." The real fault of the system, or curse of the country, is that it deprives her of so many delights of the stomach and eye. No French restaurant in Moscow or the entire country!
What's strange about such sentiments is their lodging in a born hick. Ordinarily, they'd be muttered by disaffected—and relatively rich—Moscow intellectuals, who give them a more political slant. As with her personal hygiene, so scrupulous that "that place" is always as fresh-smelling as her hair, she's the exception that proves the rule: a mutation from the village girl species.
But although she laments the country's condition, I must be careful not to "slander." Occasionally she erupts into Russian-earth ardor more fervent than a dozen Viktors. Once we were in a village and I was shaking my head—in commiseration, not disparagement—at the sight of a peasant whose frostbitten face and splayed earflaps spoke of a lifetime of draft-animal labor; whose cottage cried out with slovenliness. Her response was violent.
"I'm sick to death of people denigrating Russia. Smooth Westerners who'll never understand the truth of this country, who don't know its suffering, even its pleasures, because they're
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insulated from real life—even their own. By what measure do you suppose you are superior to that man?"